The ‘worn equipment’ icon has been changed to distinguish it from the ‘hero’ icon.

The drawer icon has been replaced with a settings cog to make room.

Alongside these changes, we’re also running tests on the tutorial. Half of new players will get the existing tutorial unchanged, while the other half will start with only the settings button on the ribbon, with the inventory, skills and worn equipment windows opened as they’re first seen. These players will also have the default set of buttons activated after the tutorial, where we hope to see players having a less confusing experience and, as a result, fewer players dropping out.

We’ve been using some new tools to track which scripts are running in the client in certain situations. Using these, we've been able to identify unnecessary and/or expensive code, investigating what these scripts are doing and then optimising where we can.

The benefits should affect everyone, but will be more noticeable on lower-end machines. Changes include:

Bank

Client-side spoofing tries to predict what will happen and helps make the bank seem more responsive. When spam clicking to withdraw multiple items, this could get out of sync and cause a well-known ‘tab flickering’ bug. Changes have been made to reduce the likelihood of this error occurring.

The way the icons are built when the bank is loaded has changed. This means items should no longer 'pop in' when scrolling through.

The efficiency of individual scripts has been generally improved.

Measure have been put in place to stop the interface from repositioning everything when no changes have been made to the inventory.

General improvements

In historical cases, and especially on first login, window positioning may have occurred several times. This should now only happen once.

By deleting permanent interface components and only building them when required, almost 1,000 components no longer use memory constantly.

Several scripts run every client frame, for purposes such as controlling animations. These run in the background even when you’re doing nothing, and we’ve made several changes:

Overall, we’ve reduced the run-time of these passive scripts by almost 95%.

Global transparency was using these scripts, and accounted for a large portion of this. We’ve changed the way it’s implemented, but unfortunately it means we can no longer use the current setting, so all transparency will be set to the default of 50% on login.

Several features such as loading screens now stop running these scripts when turned off.

Bugs have been fixed which allowed some of these scripts to keep running after they were meant to be finished.

Loading screens

After detecting that the game is loading, there is now a half-second pause before triggering a loading screen, avoiding unnecessary loading screens such as when going through doors in barrows.

The loading screen now has a disable button, saving new players from having to locate it in the settings menu.

Unstable essence has become (slightly!) more stable. For example, it will now show as Runecrafting in the Make-X interface rather than Cooking.

So i've been playing RuneScape very sparingly since about late 2013, until recent holiday travels resulted in me listening to several episodes of RSBandBUpdate in the car during my travels. Ultimately, this may have resulted in my return to the game. My question for you all is what new content over the past year or two do you think has made a positive impact on the day to day way you play RuneScape (aside from the obvious stuff such as NXT). This can be larger updates, or even smaller quality of life fixes that you think are good for a returning player to know about. There have been a lot of content updates that i've missed out on during my break, and i'm trying my best to catch up and stay in the know about what's good to try out as far as new content.

Also, are any of you all tea drinkers? If so what kind of tea is your favorite?

I'm thrilled to be playing RS again, and RSBandB has always made me feel welcome as a part of the community.

All the best,

Zant

If you want to send in a question, email questions@rsbandb.com, call or text 571-57-BANDB (571-572-2632), or leave us a DM on Twitter.

Teaser: A quest overview of Evil Dave’s Big Day Out and the debate of bottle quests vs epic story quests. Also, the ribbon gains customization abilities but how does it fit in overall with the RuneScape interface. And the combat winter weekend is upon us.